Opening the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository is right
for Nevada. It's right for anyone who pays for electricity.
It's right for public safety. It's right for energy security.
And it's right for national security.

Why is it needed? Because reactor sites are running out of
room to store their used fuel, and building more facilities would
waste ratepayers' money. Also, we should start moving the radioactivity
below ground, where it can do no harm.

Risk from transportation? Forget it. There have already been
over 3,000 shipments of spent fuel with no release of radioactivity
in the few traffic accidents that have occurred. The casks are
virtually indestructible. One was deliberately hit by an anti-tank
weapon, and the potential hazard turned out to be very small because
few particles of damaged fuel came back out through the hole.

A terrorist who assaulted one of those casks would be wasting
his talents - he could do far more damage by attacking a gasoline
tanker.

Then there is the concern about leakage from the repository
thousands of years hence. That comes from requiring that buried
material be isolated for more than ten thousand years. The worry
is misplaced, for two reasons.

First, anything that did leak into the water table would be
lost in the natural background radiation by the time (centuries
from now) that it reached the surface. There are already far
more plutonium and fission products under the ground at the Nevada
test site - with no special containment, and posing no threat
to people - than could ever be expected to leak through the confinement
barriers at Yucca Mountain, even in ten thousand years.

Second, the ten thousand year criterion is irrelevant. The needed
isolation time can be dramatically reduced by abandoning our wasteful
"once-through" policy (we pass the fuel once through
a reactor and then throw it out, with 95 percent of its energy
still there). That fuel is a valuable resource as feed stock
for advanced fast reactors.

When suitably reprocessed fuel is used in fast reactors, essentially
all of the long-lived radioactive isotopes are consumed, leaving
only the real waste - the fission products - whose radioactivity
would fall below any level of concern in just a few hundred years.

Fast reactors have other advantages. For one thing, there
is a pyrometallurgical process that recycles their fuel without
ever producing separated plutonium that could be used for bombs
- unlike the Purex process now used in other countries, which
does turn out chemically pure plutonium.

Also, the "pyroprocessing" product is far more proliferation-resistant
than today's unreprocessed used fuel.

The time has come to reopen the issues of reprocessing and
to move to the inherently safe fast reactor. With reprocessing
facilities and fast reactors near the repository, Nevada would
greatly benefit in the short term from the economic activity associated
with opening the repository, and in the long term from the sale
of electricity to other states.

Realistically then, Yucca Mountain should merely be an interim
storage facility. There is no need for spent fuel to stay there
forever. But even if it does, it poses no realistic risk to present
or future generations.

# # #

Gerald E. Marsh is a physicist who served with the U.S. START
delegation and was a consultant to the Office of the Chief of
Naval Operations on strategic nuclear policy and technology for
many years. He is on the advisory board of The National Center
for Public Policy Research.

George S. Stanford is a nuclear reactor physicist, now retired
from Argonne National Laboratory after a career of experimental
work pertaining to power-reactor safety.